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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Woman AD 190 tempera on wood Bode Museum, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Woman AD 150 tempera on wood Musée du Louvre |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Woman AD 130-150 tempera on wood Musée du Louvre |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Woman AD 100-150 tempera on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Soldier AD 130 tempera on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Soldier AD 100-150 tempera on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Man AD 125-150 tempera on wood Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Young Man 1st century AD tempera on wood Oriental Institute Museum University of Chicago |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Woman AD 130-160 tempera on wood Detroit Institute of Arts |
"Historically, the intense interest generated by mummy portraits has fueled centuries of collecting, underhanded dealing, and even formal excavations whose material consequences were not greatly distinguishable from all-out looting. . . . The loss of so much archaeological context in the excavations of the past – truly the great challenge, bugbear, frustration, and perverse fascination of studying the mummy portraits – has left many questions about them likely, perhaps even doomed, to remain open. This has not, however, much dampened enthusiasm for the approximately one thousand portraits and fragments known to be extant and scattered throughout the museums of the world. Indeed, the impassioned intricacies of the many scholarly debates surrounding them have, if anything, only intensified. This enthusiasm typically features portraits being hailed as "naturalistic," which seems to be generally understood to convey that their execution of the human form largely calls upon Greco-Roman rather than pharaonic Egyptian models as well as to articulate the portrait's capacity to give the impression that one is in the presence of a carefully individualized personality. The latter effect has culminated in some rather ecstatic, indeed almost mystical strands of criticism. A characteristic example is given by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, who rhapsodizes, "they are not art, but truth." . . . That the mummy portraits are, in fact, the "only corpus of coloured representations of individuals to survive from classical antiquity" is also critical. The mere fact that they are painted gives them a vibrant novelty so seductively different from, for example, the monochromatic marbles and bronzes of Greece and Rome. Such sculptures, of course, looked quite different at the time of their creation. Most would have been brightly painted and many would have had colored inlays; it is only the passage of time that has rendered them monochromatic. . . . One wishes that works on mummy portraits pitched to the general public – as many often are – might spare a contextualizing sentence or two to help rectify this skewed perception of ancient aesthetics. One might also wish treatments of mummy portraits were a little more forthcoming about the extent to which, due to conservation and restoration efforts of the past, we experience the portraits through a materially altered lens. These factors, perhaps as much as any, are to blame for the "not-art-but-truth" school of responses . . . "
– Alethea Roe, from Not Art but Truth: a Brief History of Mummy Portrait Reception, published in Discentes Journal (2016)
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Woman AD 117-138 encaustic on wood Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Woman AD 100 encaustic on wood Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Woman AD 75-100 encaustic on wood Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Woman AD 60 tempera on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Military Officer AD 150 tempera on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |
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| Roman Egypt Mummy Portrait of Man AD 100 encaustic on wood Antikensammlung, Berlin |